US regulator clears Zoox to charge for rides in a car with no wheel

NHTSA gave Zoox federal clearance to sell rides in vehicles built without steering wheels or pedals, capped at 2,500 units a year.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has cleared Zoox to charge money for rides in vehicles that have no steering wheel and no pedals. Waymo has run paid robotaxi service in the US for years, but in modified consumer cars that keep human controls; Zoox's vehicle is built without them, which is what makes this the first federal approval of its kind.

The permission is bounded. NHTSA administrator Jonathan Morrison told Reuters that Zoox may commercially deploy up to 2,500 vehicles in each of the next two years. Zoox cannot sell the vehicles, only run them. It carries extra reporting duties covering crashes and incidents such as stopping inappropriately in the roadway, and Morrison noted the agency can pull the exemption if major safety problems appear. State and local approval is still required market by market. Paid service starts in Las Vegas, with other cities following as Zoox satisfies each state's requirements.

Deleting the driver's seat is what separates cheap autonomous transport from merely automated driving. The cabin gets designed around passengers instead of around a driving position, and the per-vehicle cost stops carrying a steering column, pedals and the redundancy they imply. A granted federal exemption also becomes the template the next applicant files against.

The limits are real: 2,500 vehicles a year is a pilot, not a fleet; the clearance is revocable; and the state-by-state approvals that have paced every robotaxi rollout so far are unchanged by this.

Source: CleanTechnica